Alan Belward, of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Italy, said the likely rapid growth of ‘environmental refugees’ – people seeking refuge as a result of environmental disaster – should give “cause for real concern”.

He warned that it was not only events such as the recent Asian tsunami which caused people to flee their homes. “Changes in our climate will also force people to be displaced in growing numbers,” said Belward, head of the centre’s global vegetation monitoring department. “And, of course, it is usually those people who are least able to cope with such displacement who are often most at risk.”

Research shows that there are currently an estimated 25 million environmental refugees compared with 22m political refugees. Bangladesh alone expects to have about 20m people displaced in coming years and, by 2050, mostly because of the likely effects of global warming, there could be more than 150m worldwide.

The Red Cross say that while in 1992 they assisted less than 500,000 people fleeing natural disasters, by 1998 that figure had risen to 1.5m.

Belward, a speaker at the Earth Observation Summit in Brussels yesterday (16 February) – organised by the Commission as part of European Space Week – says that national governments have to face up to the consequences of displacement caused by floods, rising sea levels and deforestation. He said: “The prospect of considerable numbers of environmental refugees is certainly one of the most worrying aspects of global warming but it is something we all have to address.”

A recent breakthrough in environmental monitoring from Space could, however, make it more possible to determine the impact of major climatic events, he said.

Scientists at the JRC have recently developed a new way to interpret data from satellites observing the Earth. The new method involves the use of practical algorithms to interpret remote sensing data collected by sensors in satellites.